Outrage Runs with the Bulls

Greetings from Chennai, where shops are shuttered, truckers refuse to budge, schools are closed and celebrities including A.R. Rahman are tweeting up a storm. Doctors plan to form supportive human chains in and techies are spending their breaks voicing their outrage. Traffic has ground to a halt and lawyers in some towns have pitched in to block the roads. Protesters by the many thousands have swarmed Marina beach and villages and cities across Tamil Nadu. Not in solidarity with the Women's March on Washington and all who oppose the despicable new president, but against a national ban on Jallikattu, an ancient South Indian tournament that requires participants to grab bulls by their humps and wrestle them to the ground. (Humps? See Wikipedia if you don't believe me.)

 PETA,  India's ardently pro-Hindu government and the country's Supreme Court have put the kibash  on the tradition.  Protesters say the ban takes aim at Tamil culture. Tamil Nadu's interim chief minister (who took the reins when the mighty Amma died recently) took a lot of flack because he didn't fight the ban to the death. The backlash has caused him to reconsider and he has allegedly pledged to create a loophole as big as the state (creating a law to make it a traditional sport) to allow Jallikattu to continue.

 N.B. A spectator was gored to death this week in a village where Jallikattu took place despite the ban.

Jallikattu
The Hindu

Pro-bull wrestling fanatics: 

Hugging the hump